One reason why this is hard to get off the ground is because the game is so personalized by all of us.

Do you include teen pregnancy (which changes the rating of the game, I believe) or do you leave it out?
Do you include autonomous romance, or do you leave it out?
Do you include an aging mod, and if so, which one?

And now you're down to twenty percent of the original interested parties, at most.

Quite honestly, I think there's plenty of texture and mesh replacements for nearly everything ingame by now - clothes, skins, eyes, most furniture, etc. And there's more CC than anyone could hope to put in one game.

As for HQ textures, it depends on the size. 1024x1024 works if you need a bit more detail, but any bigger and there's a risk the game won't handle the texture memory any better (pink-flashing, lag, etc.) the more textures you replace.

I did a very simple HQ update for my baby sims, basically made the skin 1024x1024 instead of 512, so infant outfits in the same size won't be so blurry (they show up with the texture size of the skin, even if a bigger texture is available). I also tend to use that size for recolors when I want some more details.

One reason why this is hard to get off the ground is because the game is so personalized by all of us.

Do you include teen pregnancy (which changes the rating of the game, I believe) or do you leave it out?
Do you include autonomous romance, or do you leave it out?
Do you include an aging mod, and if so, which one?

And now you're down to twenty percent of the original interested parties, at most.

I thought the HD remaster would be solely graphical. Though that opens its own can of worms what with default replacements and everything.

I'm with Sunbee Even if you had a team together, doesn't mean they will agree especially not if you include mods. I can see it now arguments over teen pregnancy, MM vs realistic, one person thinks high heels are great on everything while the next wants vans on everything and that texture you love so much? The next person thinks it looks like squirrel poop.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown

An overview of existing texture replacements and useful mods (like the Sims2default site for clothes) would probably be more useful. There are several thousands (millions?) of players, and equally as many opinions on visual style and preferences. You can't please everyone with one collection of mods. Some like realism, some like maxis-match, and the rest like anything in between. Some love vibrant colors, others prefer duller colors. Some want a more modernish look (somewhere in the 1990s to 2010s, in style with the original game) other simmers love playing with alien worlds or themed settings, anything from pre-historic to futuristic times, and styles like apocalypse or steampunk. There's no single mod collection that could encompass all those different preferences.

If you plan on including mods or CC from various creators, make sure to ask them if it's okay or check their TOUs if they have one. Some simmers are perfectly okay with their mods and CC being shared - but personally I'm not too fond of seeing my items reuploaded or converted and uploaded without conscent, and I'm pretty sure there are other simmers who share that opinion.

meh. I feel like I remastered my own game by defaulting out all of the hair, clothes, skins, eyes, foliage, and some of the walls even. I use HQ floors and furniture, and skyboxes for the hood + the radiance mod (so I sometimes get some truly gorgeous skies. Like, stunningly real.)

I wouldn't want anything else unless it was a full relaunch of TS2 - as another poster had mentioned - with a redeployment of the engine. In fact, I suspect that instead of TS5 that might be what we get: a rerun version of one of the existing iterations but better. (It'd be a lot less pain for the developers I feel like.)

meh. I feel like I remastered my own game by defaulting out all of the hair, clothes, skins, eyes, foliage, and some of the walls even. I use HQ floors and furniture, and skyboxes for the hood + the radiance mod (so I sometimes get some truly gorgeous skies. Like, stunningly real.)

I wouldn't want anything else unless it was a full relaunch of TS2 - as another poster had mentioned - with a redeployment of the engine. In fact, I suspect that instead of TS5 that might be what we get: a rerun version of one of the existing iterations but better. (It'd be a lot less pain for the developers I feel like.)

Yeah, everyone wants better lot imposters. And it might even be possible to have them. Criquette, for instance, figured out how to make the roofs look better, but the change doesn't save from session to session. But the thing is... The game, at its core, has texture memory processing issues. While you can force it higher-res to an extent, there's a definite upper limit as to what it can take.

The issue, as I understand it from reading around, is this: Say you have your Sim go to a community lot. The game, having already loaded all the textures necessary to render the home lot and its occupants AND the (low-res) textures for the neighboring lots, then goes ahead and loads up all the textures necessary to render the community lot (and ITS neighbors and any Sims that show up on it, etc.), too. The problem is that it DOESN'T "unload" the now-unnecessary textures needed for the residential lot and its neighbors and then reloads them when you return the Sim home. Instead, it caches all those textures so that it doesn't have to reload them when you send your Sim home, thus saving load time between lots. It also caches the textures for the community lot and its neighbors. And then if you send a Sim out again to a different community lot, you'll then have the textures for the home lot, the first community lot, and the second community lot AND all of those lots' neighbors, plus the textures for the Sims that it's rendered during the session like clothing, skintone, hair, etc., in the "box." That box has a size that's defined by the size of your video card's texture memory and by the amount of that memory the game is set to use according to your Graphics Rules set-up. And when that box is full? Well, then the game starts more or less randomly yanking cached textures out of the box in order to make room for new ones as you play. Eventually, it will remove textures necessary to whatever you're currently doing in the game and the game will never reload those textures it ejects. That results in those suddenly-missing textures flashing pink instead. The longer you play -- especially if you bounce between households and lots often or, God forbid, if you bounce between subhoods or entire neighborhoods in the same session -- the more textures get crammed into the "box" so the more likely it is that textures will get ejected out of the "box" and you'll pink out.

High-res textures use up many times more texture memory than lower-res ones do. Fully-rendered neighboring lots with high-res textures would likely pink the game very, very quickly, and the only way to fix The Pink once it starts is to quit the game (if it doesn't crash on you first) and reload it. This clears the texture memory cache, and you start filling up the "box" again.

In order to fix this issue, the game would have to be retooled at its most basic level so that it wouldn't cache textures but would instead load (and "unload") them on-demand. (As TS3 does, I believe, for its "open world" without lot imposters... which results in gray lumps until everything renders properly, which can take a long time with weaker video cards.) If TS2 didn't cache textures, it would likely result in much longer loading screens...and some people whine about that as it is. But even if that was acceptable, you'd need the game's source code to change how it works with textures, which you'll simply never get.

In the end, you really, truly can't "remaster" the game just by cramming it full of a ton of high-res stuff. Well, you CAN but the more such stuff you have and use in your neighborhoods, the faster it'll pink out. I've been playing around with high-res lately, pushing limits, and for me with the mid-range video card in my Simming computer that has 1.7GB of texture memory, it'll work for quite a long time IF the neighborhood I'm playing isn't large, densely-populated, and/or heavily-decorated. For instance, I have an almost-fully-rebuilt but sparsely-populated-and-decorated Strangetown that's about 90% high-res (with a goal of being 100% high-res) and so far in its test playing run-through I haven't had any pink show up even after playing for many hours in a session. (Because I'll leave the game loaded sometimes when I'm not playing it, sometimes for days at a time, so a "session" can last, like, 30 hours, but those hours wouldn't be in one solid chunk, obviously.) On the other hand, I have a very dense and heavily-decorated downtown neighborhood that ISN'T all high-res but that is large and densely-built with many lots and does have some high-res stuff like a sky and a horizon and lots of high-res neighborhood deco. (Here's the last pic I took of it, although I've added more since then.) The way I play it also requires bouncing between community lots often. It'll start to pink after only about two hours of playing, and that's with forcing the game to use all the texture memory that my video card has, via the Graphics Rules.

So way tl;dr: Going all super-high-res without being able to address the underlying issue that the game has with texture memory processing is a waste of time. Especially for people who don't have even a mid-range dedicated video card, as I have in my Simming machine, because they'll just choke/crash and/or pink very quickly. Having a high-end card with a ton of texture memory doesn't fix the game's processing issues; it only means you'll have more time to play before the pinking starts, but it WILL pink eventually if you cram it full o' high-res stuff. Even with a super-high-end card, you're still hamstrung by the game's 2004 coding. That's just the way it is.

To be honest I am very happy with my Sims just as it is, with some of the modders and there mods, have raise the Sims 2 game.
Another thing to think about just how far can you really go with going over the entire game without EA / Maxis stepping in with their rights or copy right of the game? I don't know just saying.
I know some modders had problems in the past with EA.

"Nothing in life is a Surprise it just happen to come your way at the time".

woah, thanks for the explanation there! Hmm, that's interesting. I think I wouldn't mind slightly longer load times if it meant more attractive lot imposters. I've never had pink flashing issues, and I don't ever want them, eek! That sounds like a pain to deal with.

For lot imposters maybe some form of hood deco could be used over the top of lots, that disappears once the lot is loaded but shows both in hood view and from other lots nearby.

That would actually be kinda cool. Making them not visible in lot view might be an issue, but perhaps cloning something from the "Effects" category to make them might work, since none of that stuff is visible from lots...although then they wouldn't be visible from other lots, either, only in neighborhood view. I don't know that it'd be possible to make something that's visible in lot view only when viewed from other lots but not when the lot it's sitting on is the "active" one. But if that were possible... But on second thought, you'd need high-res textures -- like on Criquette's stuff, which is resource-eating -- on those puppies to make them remotely convincing...and then you're back to the same problem.

Honestly, I think with stuff that's recently been made to give the game a prettier, updated, and more "open world" look -- the skies, the horizons, the high-res terrain/road defaults, the lit-up and seasonal and high-res neighborhood deco, the water mods, the higher-res objects converted from newer games, in addition to better-textured stuff to put on Sims; mostly stuff that's been made since this thread was originally posted in 2014 -- the game's about as good as it's gonna get, appearance-wise, without pushing its 2004-era core programming limitations too much. I mean, if you cram a ton of that newer stuff into your neighborhoods you're gonna have issues with pinking and whatnot, as I said, but if you're sensible about it and understand the limitations and boundaries, you can strike a fairly good balance between the game looking really nice and yet still functioning in "normal" gameplay without too many problems. That's why I've been pushing the limits lately, to see exactly what those boundaries are for my game on the machine I use for TS2.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Natpop

woah, thanks for the explanation there! Hmm, that's interesting. I think I wouldn't mind slightly longer load times if it meant more attractive lot imposters. I've never had pink flashing issues, and I don't ever want them, eek! That sounds like a pain to deal with.

Yeah, sorry about that. I shoulda said that really only about the first paragraph of what I said was meant for you, specifically. Your comment was just a good jumping-off point for what I wanted to say about the topic in general.

But anyway, the pink thing isn't terrible. People freak out (understandably) and think it's "corruption" or a sign of a broken game when they first see it, and more and more people are seeing it for the first time now that more and more pretty and high-res stuff is being made for the game or converted from other games. But it's really just the game's way of telling you that it's lost the ability to access the textures it needs to render something properly. A relatively recent UC update started making the game flash pink for other reasons (Which is another reason why the UC will never be on my Simming computer ), but generally? Yeah, people bring it on themselves by forcing the game to do stuff that it really can't do. It's a pain to deal with only in the sense that, other than scaling-back one's lots/neighborhoods, the only way to "fix" it (temporarily) is to exit the game and reload it. Since some people go waaaaaaay overboard with downloading CC (I try to keep it around 5 or 6GB, myself, so that load time is reasonable and it's easier to find stuff in my catalogs), their load time can be quite massive, so that's annoying and perhaps time-prohibitive.

I wouldn't want anything else unless it was a full relaunch of TS2 - as another poster had mentioned - with a redeployment of the engine. In fact, I suspect that instead of TS5 that might be what we get: a rerun version of one of the existing iterations but better. (It'd be a lot less pain for the developers I feel like.)

The scuttlebutt from another thread is that TS5 will be solely a mobile game. A definite thing to skip for most people, I think. That will signal the end of the sims development, IMO.